Popular Indian Cuisine: 10 Dishes You Should Know

Indian cuisine is not one cuisine at all, but a set of regional food cultures built around different staple grains, fats and spice techniques, tied together by a shared love of bold, layered flavour. The 10 dishes below, from biryani to dal makhani, are the ones most likely to show up on a menu anywhere in the world that serves Indian food, and each one comes from a specific place and a specific history rather than a single, generic “Indian” tradition.

“Curry” is not the name of a dish

Curry is an English umbrella term, not a specific Indian dish or an Indian word for one. The word comes from the Tamil “kari,” meaning a sauce or relish made with vegetables or meat, which 16th and 17th century British traders and colonial officials anglicised into “curry” and then applied to almost any spiced, sauced dish from the Indian subcontinent. Indian cooks themselves rarely use the word “curry” at all: a dish is called by its own name, such as korma, vindaloo, rogan josh or the butter chicken and dal makhani covered below, each with its own specific ingredients and technique. When a menu abroad lists “chicken curry” or “vegetable curry,” it is using a British-era catch-all for what, in India, would be dozens of distinctly different dishes.

North Indian and South Indian food are genuinely different cuisines

Northern India cooks around wheat, dairy and the tandoor, while southern India cooks around rice, lentils and coconut. In the north, wheat flatbreads such as roti and naan sit alongside dishes built on ghee, cream and paneer, and meat is often slow-cooked in a tomato-onion gravy or roasted in a clay tandoor oven, a style shaped heavily by Mughal-era Persian and Central Asian cooking. In the south, rice and rice-and-lentil batters form the base of most meals, coconut oil replaces ghee as the primary fat, and dishes are finished with tempering: a scoop of mustard seeds, curry leaves, dried chillies and asafoetida bloomed briefly in hot oil and poured over the dish as a final step, rather than blended into a gravy from the start. The result is that South Indian food tends to taste brighter and more tangy, built around tamarind and curry leaves, while North Indian food tends to taste richer and more aromatic, built around dairy and warming whole spices.

1. Biryani

Biryani is a layered rice dish built around basmati rice, meat, vegetables or eggs, and a specific blend of spices and saffron. The name comes from the Persian word “birian,” meaning fried or roasted before cooking, and the dish itself arrived in India with Persian imperial chefs during the Mughal era from the 16th century onward, before being reworked by Indian cooks into dozens of regional forms.

Every biryani-making region in India claims its own style. Hyderabadi biryani, the spiciest and most widely known variety, is credited by local tradition to the kitchen of the first Nizam of Hyderabad in the mid-18th century, while Lucknowi (Awadhi) biryani, from the royal kitchens of Awadh in Uttar Pradesh, is milder and more fragrant, often finished with dried fruit and rosewater.

2. Dosa

Dosa is a thin, crisp pancake made from a fermented batter of rice and urad dal (black lentils), left to ferment for 8 to 12 hours before cooking. The dish traces back to Tamil Sangam-era literature written around 2,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest continuously eaten foods in South India, though the thin, crisp version most people know today only took shape around temple kitchens in the Udupi region of Karnataka from about the 12th century onward.

Dosa is typically served with a range of chutneys and sambar, a tangy lentil stew, and it now exists in dozens of regional variations, including masala dosa (stuffed with spiced potato), rava dosa (made with semolina), paper dosa and set dosa.

3. Idli and sambar

Idli are steamed cakes made from a fermented batter of rice and urad dal, and they are usually served alongside sambar, a tangy stew of lentils, tamarind and vegetables. Idli’s history stretches back to references in Tamil literature from around the 8th century, though the light, spongy version made with fermented rice and lentil batter is generally credited to later Indonesian trading influence on the South Indian coast. Sambar is traditionally traced to the royal kitchens of Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu in the 17th century.

Together, idli and sambar make up one of South India’s most common breakfasts, and the pairing has spread across the country as a quick, filling, vegetarian meal available at any time of day.

4. Butter chicken and butter paneer

Butter chicken is a mildly spiced, tomato-based gravy finished with butter and cream, and its vegetarian counterpart, butter paneer, swaps the chicken for cubes of fresh Indian cheese. Both dishes are widely traced to Moti Mahal, a restaurant opened in Delhi in 1947 by Partition-era refugees from Peshawar; the accepted story is that leftover tandoori chicken was mixed into a tomato-butter gravy to keep it moist for late customers, though the exact inventor is still disputed between two branches of the founding family, including in a 2024 court case.

Every restaurant and household in India now has its own version of butter chicken and butter paneer, which is part of why the dish is so often the entry point for people trying Indian food for the first time.

5. Tandoori meats, vegetables and bread

Tandoori dishes are cooked in a tandoor, a cylindrical clay or charcoal oven that exposes food directly to live fire, giving it a smoky, charred flavour while cooking it quickly at high heat. The tandoor itself is an old technology shared across Central and South Asia, and its use for meats, breads and vegetables became especially associated with North Indian and Punjabi cooking.

Typical tandoor dishes include tandoori chicken (murgh), tandoori roti, butter naan, kulcha, and vegetables such as tandoori gobi (cauliflower) and tandoori aloo (potato).

6. Samosas

A samosa is a fried, triangular pastry filled with spiced potato, peas, lentils or minced meat, usually served with mint and tamarind chutney. The dish did not arrive with the Mughals, as is often repeated: it reached India centuries earlier, brought by Middle Eastern and Central Asian chefs cooking in the royal kitchens of the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th or 14th century. The poet and scholar Amir Khusrau documented Delhi’s nobility eating a meat, ghee and onion samosa as early as around 1300, which is roughly two centuries before the Mughal Empire began.

Samosas are now sold everywhere in India as a fast, cheap snack, and the filling varies widely by region, from spiced potato and pea in the north to minced meat versions common in parts of the south and east.

7. Chaat

Chaat is a category of savoury street snacks, not a single dish, typically bought from roadside carts and combining crunchy, tangy, spicy and sweet elements in one bite. The word “chaat” comes from a Sanskrit and Prakrit root meaning “to lick” or “to relish,” and while a popular story places its invention in a 17th-century royal kitchen in northern India, dishes resembling chaat, such as dahi vada, appear in far older Indian texts.

A typical chaat combines crisp fried dough wafers called papdi, boiled potato, chickpeas, tamarind chutney, green chilli and mint chutney, dried mango powder (amchur), puffed rice, yoghurt and raw onion, mixed in different combinations to create dishes such as bhel puri, dahi puri, sev puri, pani puri and pav bhaji. Chaat originated in Uttar Pradesh and has since spread across South Asia in countless local versions.

8. Dal makhani

Dal makhani is a slow-cooked dish of whole black lentils and kidney beans, finished with butter and cream, and it is closely associated with Punjab and, like butter chicken, with Moti Mahal’s Delhi kitchen in the years after Partition. It is usually eaten with roti, naan or steamed rice, and its long, slow cooking time and dairy content make it one of the richer, more filling dishes on this list.

9. Keema

Keema is minced meat, usually mutton or chicken, cooked with onion, tomato and a blend of Indian spices until it reaches a dry, almost crumbly consistency. It is eaten with hot chapati or naan, and in several Indian states, including parts of Hyderabad and West Bengal, keema is a common breakfast dish rather than only a dinner one.

10. Kebabs

Kebabs in India are usually marinated pieces of meat, most often mutton or chicken, grilled over charcoal or pan-fried and served on skewers or as a platter. Seekh kebab, made from minced, spiced meat pressed onto skewers before grilling, is one of the most common forms, and the wider kebab tradition in India traces back to Persian and Central Asian cooking introduced through the Mughal courts.

Because they use better cuts of meat and take longer to prepare properly, kebabs tend to cost more than most other dishes on this list, which is part of why they’re often treated as a special-occasion order rather than an everyday one.

Our guide to South Indian food in Hampi goes deeper into the vegetarian side of the dishes above if you’re planning a trip that focuses on the south specifically. For more on planning a trip to India itself, our destination guide covers the practical basics.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh. The team covers India for independent travellers, including the dishes, ingredients and regional food differences worth knowing before a trip, and updates this page when facts change.